By Kim Da-ye
John Quelch, the vice president and dean of China Europe International Business School (CEIBS), speaks candidly of the duplicity of his job.
“To be a dean, you have to be a salesman as well as a scholar,” Quelch said in an interview with Business Focus during the school’s marketing trip to Seoul.
Salesman is a humble expression for Quelch who has had a distinguished career path.
He taught marketing at Harvard Business School (HBS) nearly 20 years and served as a senior associate dean between 2001 and 2008. He also spent three years between 1998 and 2001 at London Business School as the dean, helping it become one of the world’s best business schools.
The British-American joined the Shanghai-based institution dubbed as China’s best business school in February 2011 after a stint as a visiting professor in 2009 during a sabbatical from Harvard.
Don’t expect an all-academic, pompous scholar from Quelch. He comes across more as an entrepreneur who knows his industry in and out and whose business practices make him a role model not only to administrators but also to business leaders.
The dean is in Seoul to help strengthen the Korean alumni network and publicize CEIBS’ executive MBA program, which is the largest by revenue in Asia.
He didn’t throw a cocktail party for networking, but prepared what he is best at ― a speech and presentation on digital marketing in China. He remained energetic throughout the interview after standing two hours straight behind the podium.
It is clear why CEIBS needed him.
CEIBS is a joint venture between the Chinese government and the European Union set in 1994. The school has a European president, a European dean, a Chinese executive president and a Chinese co-dean.
In this environment of shared governance, Quelch says that someone in the administration has to have appetite for frequent and transparent communication, tolerance for ambiguity and no fear for being controlled.
“If you are too egocentric you can never survive in such the governance system,” Quelch says.
“I had a very fortunate career. I don’t need at this stage of my career to have a total control in order to be satisfied.”
It would be a difficult decision for anyone to leave Harvard and move to China, but Quelch is convinced China would emerge as one of the global business education hubs like the U.S. and the U.K.
“When I took the job at CEIBS, half of my friends said, ‘Congratulations (but we think you are crazy).’ The other half of my friends said, ‘Congratulations (and we really understand that is an awesome move),’” Quelch said, wiggling his fingers making the shape of a parentheses.
He says he doesn’t doubt that Shanghai will outperform Hong Kong and Singapore over the next five to 10 years and become the center of business education in Asia, citing the opening of the Harvard Shanghai Center in 2008 and a Shanghai campus of the Fuqua School of Business of Duke University.
Quelch’s logic is simple. People want to do an MBA in a country that is the largest market.
He emphasizes on CEIBS’ marketing slogan of “China depth, global breadth.” He elaborates that no international schools understand China better than CEIBS does and no Chinese school is more international than CEIBS is.
His advice for fledgling global MBA programs at major Korean universities is, “Korean depth, global breadth” as he sees challenges ahead for Korean business schools because of the location in a market smaller than China and the U.S.
His high hope for CEIBS and China can’t be taken light, judging by the history of his career. Quelch’s innovation of London Business School is already widely known.
Under his three-year leadership, the school’s revenue increased 50 percent and the number of alumni clubs went up from zero to 25.
The London-based school was ranked first in both 2010 and 2011 although it fell to the fourth this year, according to the British business daily Financial Times’ global MBA rankings. Back in 2000, it was ranked eighth while Harvard Business School topped the chart.
Quelch recalls that moving from Harvard to LBS was regarded as “very unusual” back then.
“But I could see the upside potential of London Business School. I could imagine the future. I could imagine how I could contribute to accelerating the process,” Quelch says, adding that he could envision the same for CEIBS.
How did he literally created LBS’s alumni network and what is he going to do for CEIBS?
Legwork is his answer. He says that organizing alumni is easy because they carry the brand of the school they graduated from on their resumes throughout their life, so they hope the alma maters do well.
As a dean, he says all he has to do is to come and say hello at least once a year to motivate them.
“What you don’t do is contacting someone you haven’t reached out for 10 years and asking for money,” Quelch says.
“If I ask for money, all I get is advice. But if I ask for advice, I end up getting money.”
For CEIBS, his priority was getting the positioning of the school (China depth, global breadth) right. Then he tries to strengthen the global alumni network of the school, which he calls an “unpaid sales organization.”
The dean says he tells the alumni that Harvard has some 80,000 compared to CEIBS’ 12,000, so each of them has to work seven times as hard as a Harvard alumnus. He sees alumni clubs popping up across the world in Korea, Japan, Singapore, Britain and Spain.
Thirdly, he is working on an international advisory board that advises global CEOs, not the chiefs of local subsidiaries, on doing business in China. He says that 10 global firms have signed up to support the program so far and they include L’Oreal, Kraft Foods, Novartis, IBM and Rio Tinto.
At the end of the day, what matters the most about an MBA program is its content, not its facade.
The dean, who aside from his career in various business schools, received an MBA degree at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and a doctorate at Harvard Business School, know what a successful program requires.
His utmost priority is faculty members who are thought leaders passionate about teaching.
“There are a lot of thought leaders who don’t want to see their students. We don’t want to hire them,” he says. “If students are allured to come to the school because of famous faculties and if they never see them, that leaves very bad taste.”
The second important factor is admission of outstanding students who can challenge each other and build lifelong friendships and whom they wouldn’t have easily met otherwise.
Lastly, Quelch stresses on the “boot camp approach to the basic nuts and bolts of business” including finance, operations management and microeconomics.
He notices many business schools creating express courses emphasizing on leadership and entrepreneurships without ensuring their students graduate with all the fundamentals in the place.
“It’s like building a house on a bad foundation,” he says.
As the interview went into overtime, this reporter couldn’t press a question about marketing. Before a salesman, he is a thought leader in marketing ― his case studies have sold over 3.4 million copies ― the third highest in Harvard Business School’s history ― over the past 20 years.
Asked what he notices about marketing practices of large Korean conglomerates, Quelch says that Korean brands have shown they can deliver value ― a quality product at a good price ― as well as technological innovation. But many of them, such as Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics, are yet to show an engineering capability that creates an emotional connection with consumers, he says, warning that Chinese firms are catching up fast.
“What Korean companies have to do is to develop greater emotional intelligence ― to develop consumer insight not in terms of product functionality but in terms of communications,” Quelch says. He names Hyundai Motor as a Korean firm advancing fast in building up that emotional intelligence.
The dean whose book “All Business Is Local” was published in early February lastly emphasized on the importance of localization that requires extra costs but could yield much greater profits.
To the last minute of the interview, Quelch shows what an ideal marriage of a scholar and an entrepreneur can be.